Thirty And Thriving Quotes

In thirty years Iraq too has gone from being among the most modern and secular of Arab countries -with women working, artists thriving, journalists writing- into a squalid playpen for a megalomaniac.

Because a bunch of dudes beating on one dude who was already on the ground until he's brain damaged and broken is wrong. Because prosecuting people differently for the same exact crimes because of skin color is wrong. Because some people being able to buy private islands while other people sleep outside on the ground is wrong. Because knowingly destroying poor communities with drugs let in to fund wars against foreign regimes is fundamentally wrong. Because even though you finally enact a Civil Rights Act not even thirty years ago, it doesn't erase centuries of unequal wealth, unequal access, unequal schooling, unequal living conditions, unequal policing. You can't tell people to pull up on bootstraps when half of them never had any boots to begin with, never even had the chance to get them. Or when you let people burn whole, thriving black communities to the ground and conveniently forget about it. Because maybe the problem isn't only with "bad" people, maybe the problem is with the whole system.

Hayes and his colleagues have distilled these insights into seven skills for coping with loss. In more than a thousand studies over thirty-five years, they’ve found that the acquisition of this skill set predicts whether people facing loss fall into anxiety, depression, trauma, substance abuse—or whether they thrive. The first five skills involve acceptance of the bitter. First, we need to acknowledge that a loss has occurred; second, to embrace the emotions that accompany it. Instead of trying to control the pain, or to distract ourselves with food, alcohol, or work, we should simply feel our hurt, sorrow, shock, anger. Third, we need to accept all our feelings, thoughts, and memories, even the unexpected and seemingly inappropriate ones, such as liberation, laughter, and relief. Fourth, we should expect that sometimes we’ll feel overwhelmed. And fifth, we should watch out for unhelpful thoughts, such as “I should be over this,” “It’s all my fault,” and “Life is unfair.” Indeed, the ability to accept difficult emotions—not just observe them, not just breathe through them, but actually, nonjudgmentally, accept them—has been linked repeatedly to long-term thriving.

You are a rose bush left out in the wild, scraping for survival. You have fought for everything you have, and you thrive on the struggle. You’re called to it. The harder things are, the better you get.

strongest animals in the world thrive on a fruit-and plant-based diet. Silverback gorillas, for example, are thirty times as strong as man and three times our size. Their DNA is 99 percent similar to that of humans, and they are our closest living relatives next to chimps. How are they so strong? Oh

I resolved to come right to the point. "Hello," I said as coldly as possible, "we've got to talk." "Yes, Bob," he said quietly, "what's on your mind?" I shut my eyes for a moment, letting the raging frustration well up inside, then stared angrily at the psychiatrist. "Look, I've been religious about this recovery business. I go to AA meetings daily and to your sessions twice a week. I know it's good that I've stopped drinking. But every other aspect of my life feels the same as it did before. No, it's worse. I hate my life. I hate myself." Suddenly I felt a slight warmth in my face, blinked my eyes a bit, and then stared at him. "Bob, I'm afraid our time's up," Smith said in a matter-of-fact style. "Time's up?" I exclaimed. "I just got here." "No." He shook his head, glancing at his clock. "It's been fifty minutes. You don't remember anything?" "I remember everything. I was just telling you that these sessions don't seem to be working for me." Smith paused to choose his words very carefully. "Do you know a very angry boy named 'Tommy'?" "No," I said in bewilderment, "except for my cousin Tommy whom I haven't seen in twenty years..." "No." He stopped me short. "This Tommy's not your cousin. I spent this last fifty minutes talking with another Tommy. He's full of anger. And he's inside of you." "You're kidding?" "No, I'm not. Look. I want to take a little time to think over what happened today. And don't worry about this. I'll set up an emergency session with you tomorrow. We'll deal with it then." Robert This is Robert speaking. Today I'm the only personality who is strongly visible inside and outside. My own term for such an MPD role is dominant personality. Fifteen years ago, I rarely appeared on the outside, though I had considerable influence on the inside; back then, I was what one might call a "recessive personality." My passage from "recessive" to "dominant" is a key part of our story; be patient, you'll learn lots more about me later on. Indeed, since you will meet all eleven personalities who once roamed about, it gets a bit complex in the first half of this book; but don't worry, you don't have to remember them all, and it gets sorted out in the last half of the book. You may be wondering -- if not "Robert," who, then, was the dominant MPD personality back in the 1980s and earlier? His name was "Bob," and his dominance amounted to a long reign, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Since "Robert B. Oxnam" was born in 1942, you can see that "Bob" was in command from early to middle adulthood. Although he was the dominant MPD personality for thirty years, Bob did not have a clue that he was afflicted by multiple personality disorder until 1990, the very last year of his dominance. That was the fateful moment when Bob first heard that he had an "angry boy named Tommy" inside of him. How, you might ask, can someone have MPD for half a lifetime without knowing it? And even if he didn't know it, didn't others around him spot it? To outsiders, this is one of the most perplexing aspects of MPD. Multiple personality is an extreme disorder, and yet it can go undetected for decades, by the patient, by family and close friends, even by trained therapists. Part of the explanation is the very nature of the disorder itself: MPD thrives on secrecy because the dissociative individual is repressing a terrible inner secret. The MPD individual becomes so skilled in hiding from himself that he becomes a specialist, often unknowingly, in hiding from others. Part of the explanation is rooted in outside observers: MPD often manifests itself in other behaviors, frequently addiction and emotional outbursts, which are wrongly seen as the "real problem." The fact of the matter is that Bob did not see himself as the dominant personality inside Robert B. Oxnam. Instead, he saw himself as a whole person. In his mind, Bob was merely a nickname for Bob Oxnam, Robert Oxnam, Dr. Robert B. Oxnam, PhD.

Kombu is a species of edible kelp (Laminaria japonica) that thrives in long streamers about a palm's-width wide that can reach up to thirty feet in length. Along with katsuobushi, it is the other main ingredient for making dashi. Kombu contains a high level of the amino acid glutamate, which is the source of the "fifth taste", umami, and a precursor to the flavor enhancer MSG. Japan consumes about 50,000tons of kombu a year--- about half wild, and half farmed--- most of it harvested off the coast of the northern island, Hokkaidō.

My twenties and thirties were contradictory decades, years when I eliminated conditions and truths that went against my grain. The value in this conservative era was that it safeguarded me from fatal character debits early in life. It was a time when I was often more concerned with not running red lights than I was with investing in the greenlights. I did what I wanted, I learned to live. I survived. My forties were a much more affirming decade, years when I started to play offense with truths I had learned and put them into action. An era where I doubled down on what fed me. The value of this liberal age was that it illuminated my most life-endorsing character assets. It was a time when I not only cruised through more greenlights because I had eliminated more red and yellow ones, but a time when I created more greenlights to travel through. A time when past reds and yellows finally turned green, as old hardships revealed themselves as good fortune, a time when the greenlights beamed brighter because I gave them more power to shine. I did what I needed, I lived to learn. I thrived. As I approach the next chapter of truths to cross, the only thing I know for sure is that I will recalibrate again,

The Americas were a great laboratory of evolutionary experimentation, a place where animals and plants unknown in Africa and Asia had evolved and thrived. But no longer. Within 2,000 years of the Sapiens’ arrival, most of these unique species were gone. According to current estimates, within that short interval, North America lost thirty-four out of its forty-seven genera of large mammals. South America lost fifty out of sixty. The sabre-tooth cats, after flourishing for more than 30 million years, disappeared, and so did the giant ground sloths, the oversized lions, native American horses, native American camels, the giant rodents and the mammoths. Thousands of species of smaller mammals, reptiles, birds and even insects and parasites also became extinct (when the mammoths died out, all species of mammoth ticks followed them to oblivion).

The same thing, notes Brynjolfsson, happened 120 years ago, in the Second Industrial Revolution, when electrification—the supernova of its day—was introduced. Old factories did not just have to be electrified to achieve the productivity boosts; they had to be redesigned, along with all business processes. It took thirty years for one generation of managers and workers to retire and for a new generation to emerge to get the full productivity benefits of that new power source. A December 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute on American industry found a “considerable gap between the most digitized sectors and the rest of the economy over time and [found] that despite a massive rush of adoption, most sectors have barely closed that gap over the past decade … Because the less digitized sectors are some of the largest in terms of GDP contribution and employment, we [found] that the US economy as a whole is only reaching 18 percent of its digital potential … The United States will need to adapt its institutions and training pathways to help workers acquire relevant skills and navigate this period of transition and churn.” The supernova is a new power source, and it will take some time for society to reconfigure itself to absorb its full potential. As that happens, I believe that Brynjolfsson will be proved right and we will start to see the benefits—a broad range of new discoveries around health, learning, urban planning, transportation, innovation, and commerce—that will drive growth. That debate is for economists, though, and beyond the scope of this book, but I will be eager to see how it plays out. What is absolutely clear right now is that while the supernova may not have made our economies measurably more productive yet, it is clearly making all forms of technology, and therefore individuals, companies, ideas, machines, and groups, more powerful—more able to shape the world around them in unprecedented ways with less effort than ever before. If you want to be a maker, a starter-upper, an inventor, or an innovator, this is your time. By leveraging the supernova you can do so much more now with so little. As Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

The depression which spread over the world like a great conflagration toward the end of 1929 gave Adolf Hitler his opportunity, and he made the most of it. Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times, at first when the masses were unemployed, hungry and desperate, and later when they were intoxicated by war. Yet in one respect he was unique among history’s revolutionaries: He intended to make his revolution after achieving political power. There was to be no revolution to gain control of the State. That goal was to be reached by mandate of the voters or by the consent of the rulers of the nation—in short, by constitutional means. To get the votes Hitler had only to take advantage of the times, which once more, as the Thirties began, saw the German people plunged into despair; to obtain the support of those in power he had to convince them that only he could rescue Germany from its disastrous predicament. In the turbulent years from 1930 to 1933 the shrewd and daring Nazi leader set out with renewed energy to obtain these twin objectives. In retrospect it can be seen that events themselves and the weakness and confusion of the handful of men who were bound by their oath to loyally defend the democratic Republic which they governed played into Hitler’s hands. But this was by no means foreseeable at the beginning of 1930.

Ken MacLeod, a Scottish science fiction author, describes the Singularity as “the Rapture for nerds” and in the same way Christians are divided into preterist, premillennialist, and postmillennialist camps regarding the timing of the Parousia,39 Apocalyptic Techno-Heretics can be divided into three sects, renunciationist, apotheosan, and posthumanist. Whereas renunciationists foresee a dark future wherein humanity is enslaved or even eliminated by its machine masters and await the Singularity with the same sort of resignation that Christians who don’t buy into Rapture doctrine anticipate the Tribulation and the Antichrist, apotheosans anticipate a happy and peaceful amalgamation into a glorious, godlike hive mind of the sort envisioned by Isaac Asimov in his Foundation novels. Posthumanists, meanwhile, envision a detente between Man and Machine, wherein artificial intelligence will be wedded to intelligence amplification and other forms of technobiological modification to transform humanity and allow it to survive and perhaps even thrive in the Posthuman Era .40 Although it is rooted entirely in science and technology,41 there are some undeniable religious parallels between the more optimistic visions of the Singularity and conventional religious faith. Not only is there a strong orthogenetic element inherent in the concept itself, but the transhuman dream of achieving immortality through uploading one’s consciousness into machine storage and interacting with the world through electronic avatars sounds suspiciously like shedding one’s physical body in order to walk the streets of gold with a halo and a harp. Furthermore, the predictions of when this watershed event is expected to occur rather remind one of Sir Isaac Newton’s tireless attempts to determine the precise date of the Eschaton, which he finally concluded would take place sometime after 2065, only thirty years after Kurzweil expects the Singularity. So, if they’re both correct, at least Mankind can console itself that the Machine Age will be a short one.

As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn. Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future. As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it. Although my novel focuses on fictional characters, Elsa Martinelli is representative of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who went west in the 1930s in search of a better life. Many of them, like the pioneers who went west one hundred years before them, brought nothing more than a will to survive and a hope for a better future. Their strength and courage were remarkable. In writing this story, I tried to present the history as truthfully as possible. The strike that takes place in the novel is fictional, but it is based on strikes that took place in California in the thirties. The town of Welty is fictional as well. Primarily where I diverged from the historical record was in the timeline of events. There are instances in which I chose to manipulate dates to better fit my fictional narrative. I apologize in advance to historians and scholars of the era. For more information about the Dust Bowl years or the migrant experience in California, please go to my website KristinHannah.com for a suggested reading list.

The Things They Carried has sold over two million copies internationally, won numerous awards, and is an English classroom staple. Isabel Allende was the first writer to hold me inside a sentence, rapt and wondrous. It's no surprise that her most transformative writing springs from personal anguish. Her first book, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her dying grandfather whom she could not reach in time. Eva Luna, one of my favorite novels, is about an orphan girl who uses her storytelling gift to survive and thrive amid trauma, and Allende refers to the healing power of writing in many of her interviews. Allende's books have sold over fifty-six million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and been made into successful plays and movies. Such is the power of mining your deep. Jeanette Winterson acknowledges that her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her own story of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian household in the 1950s. She wrote it to create psychic space from the trauma. In her memoir, she writes of Oranges, “I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.” Sherman Alexie, who grew up in poverty on an Indian reservation that as a child he never dreamed he could leave, does something similar in his young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, named one of the “Best Books of 2007” by School Library Journal. He has said that fictionalizing life is so satisfying because he can spin the story better than real life did. Nora Ephron's roman à clef Heartburn is a sharply funny, fictionalized account of Ephron's own marriage to Carl Bernstein. She couldn't control his cheating during her pregnancy or the subsequent dissolution of their marriage, but through the novelization of her experience, she got to revise the ending of that particular story. In Heartburn, Rachel, the character based on Ephron, is asked

Why then do we wonder that heroin is everywhere? In our isolation, heroin thrives; that's its natural habitat. And our very search for painlessness led us to it. Heroin is, I believe, the final expression of values we have fostered for thirty-five years. It turns every addict into narcissistic, self-absorbed, solitary hyper-consumers. A life that finds opiates urns away from family and community and devotes itself entirely to self-gratification by buying and consuming one product - the drug that makes being alone not just all right, but preferable.

The prescribing of stimulants to ADHD youth began to take off in the 1980s, and today, thirty years later, studies have failed to show that this treatment helps children grow up and thrive. In a 2012 op-ed published in the New York Times, Alan Sroufe, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, told of this bottom-line finding: “To date, no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships, or behavior problems, the very things we want to improve…. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth.

Think about it. Look at what it took for intelligence to emerge in Nature. Today is Monday. If the 3.8 billion years life has thrived on Earth equated to 38 days, then for over a month all we had around here were microbes. “Complex, multicellular life arose last Wednesday. Dinosaurs came in on Friday. Sometime this morning, around 1am, a meteor struck and the best part of an entire phylogenetic clade was pushed to extinction. Those few avian dinosaurs that did survive went on to supply us with deep fried chicken and scrambled eggs.” I can’t help but smile at Avika’s compressed take on the history of life on Earth. “Mammals have been around at least since Sunday, but they were little more than rodents most of the time. That rock from space cleared out vast swathes of the ecosystem, and mammals rushed to fill the gap. “Every multicellular creature has some degree of intelligence, or at least instinct, but it wasn’t until some point in the last hour that the wisest of men, Homo sapiens arose, and yet even then, intelligence was little more than a desperate struggle for survival. “For the last seven minutes, or roughly two hundred thousand years, our intelligence extended little further than chipping at rocks to make stone knives. “In the last thirty seconds, we’ve been on a bender. We’ve built pyramids, sailed the oceans and landed on the Moon!” I say, “So your point is, human intelligence is the pinnacle of evolution?” “Oh, no. Not at all. There’s plenty of intelligence in the animal kingdom, especially among mammals, birds and cephalopods, but it took 3.8 billion years before intelligence could exploit its own ingenuity and blossom in its own right. “If all our intellectual accomplishments are the result of the last thirty seconds, then perhaps creating artificial intelligence isn’t quite as easy as busting out some Perl scripts.” I

Brittney, our firstborn, is married with three children. My husband and I are extroverts, and Brittney is an introvert. At first, I wasn’t sure what to do with her. She was shy, and I wondered how much to push her socially. My instincts told me she would eventually grow out of her shyness, and I wasn’t going to make a problem out of something that really wasn’t one. I regularly engaged her in conversation, encouraged her to talk about her ideas, her interests, her feelings, and what was going on inside, but I tried not to push. We did the things that happened naturally for our family. She attended classes once a week at a homeschool co-op, we went to church, and we got together with friends. I modeled what good conversation looks like, but I never really made it a topic of conversation because I felt it might make her self-conscious. Brittney made friends along the way. She loved drama class, and one of the reasons she enrolled in it was because she wanted to challenge herself to grow. When she was fifteen, she auditioned for and got the lead role in the spring play. Suddenly, she blossomed and took on a leadership role that defied all evidence she was an introvert at heart. She’s never been the same. She continued to grow in confidence and is a strong, gracious soul who isn’t afraid to say what she thinks when the situation calls for it. As a thirty-year-old mom who is homeschooling her kids, she tells me that pushing an introvert is the worst thing a parent can do. She believes she would never have grown so naturally into her own skin if we had not given her permission to do so at her own pace. After high school, she worked as a receptionist at a doctor’s office, and the patients there loved her. Not only can Brittney easily talk with people her own age, but with anyone she meets regardless of their age.

Plan to do strength training for your whole body twice weekly for twenty to thirty minutes each session.

light therapy has to be done differently than for those at the Stressed level. Rather than first thing in the morning, use thirty minutes of bright overhead light exposure in the early evening—ideally, five hours before your projected bedtime.

If you saw the documentary Super Size Me, you recall filmmaker Morgan Spurlock’s quest to see what would happen if he ate nothing but McDonald’s food for thirty consecutive days. For the first few days, we watched him cringe, even vomit from his relentless fare of Big Macs, fries, and shakes. He felt sick. He suffered terrible headaches. But then a funny thing happened. That feeling of sickness went away. The headaches disappeared. Suddenly, he began to crave the food that just days prior had him cringing and buckled over. Then he began to wake up each morning with a headache that wouldn’t quit until he got his McDonald’s fix. How can this be explained? According to Compton, Morgan’s dietary shift from a primarily plant-based diet to an entirely fast-food regimen effectively and quite rapidly replaced his healthy gut flora with a pathogenic microbial ecology that thrived specifically on the ingredients present in McDonald’s food.

The strangest thing about therapy is that it's structured around an ending. It begins with the knowledge that our time together is finite, and the successful outcome is that patients reach their goals and leave. The goals are different for each person, and therapists talked to their patients about what those goals are. Experiencing less anxiety? Relationships going more smoothly? Being kinder to yourself? The endpoint depends on the patient. In the best case, the ending feels organic. There might be more to do, but we've done a lot, enough. The patient feels good-- more resilient, more flexible, more able to navigate daily life. We've helped them hear the questions they didn't even know they were asking: Who am I? What do I want? What's in my way? It seems silly, though, to deny that therapy is also about forming deep attachments to people and then saying goodbye. Sometimes therapists find out what happens afterward, if patients come back at a later point in their lives. Other times we're left to wonder. How are they doing? Is Austin thriving after leaving his wife and coming out as a gay man in his late thirties? Is Janet's husband with Alzheimer's still alive? Did Stephanie stay in her marriage? There are so many stories left unfinished, so many people I think about but will never see again.

No other animal had ever moved into such a huge variety of radically different habitats so quickly, everywhere using virtually the same genes.6 The settling of America was hardly bloodless. It left behind a long trail of victims. American fauna 14,000 years ago was far richer than it is today. When the first Americans marched south from Alaska into the plains of Canada and the western United States, they encountered mammoths and mastodons, rodents the size of bears, herds of horses and camels, oversized lions and dozens of large species the likes of which are completely unknown today, among them fearsome sabre-tooth cats and giant ground sloths that weighed up to eight tons and reached a height of twenty feet. South America hosted an even more exotic menagerie of large mammals, reptiles and birds. The Americas were a great laboratory of evolutionary experimentation, a place where animals and plants unknown in Africa and Asia had evolved and thrived. But no longer. Within 2,000 years of the Sapiens arrival, most of these unique species were gone. According to current estimates, within that short interval, North America lost thirty-four out of its forty-seven genera of large mammals. South America lost fifty out of sixty.

However, the baby was thriving. I was no longer feeling trapped, spending thirty out of every ninety minutes attached to a Williams-Sonoma Tit Juicer. But

Political leaders and presidents were shot at or assassinated about as often as rap artists are today. An unpopular war cost fifty-eight thousand American lives. Those who bravely served our country returned home to be treated with unwarranted scorn. Promiscuous sex and hallucinatory drugs were celebrated as the path to enlightenment. Race riots set major cities aflame. Police were called pigs. And no one over the age of thirty was to be trusted. Worse, some people wore leisure suits—in public—and they were proud of it.

In 2009, Zeke and I decided to entertain suitors, in large part because Zeke’s charter school, the Equity Project, was in full swing.* It wasn’t an easy decision, but we felt that having a well-resourced parent would ensure that the company would thrive in the long term. After a competitive bidding process, we agreed to be acquired by Kaplan and the Washington Post Company in December of that year. I remember the day vividly. After all the documents were signed, I sat there and waited for the transfer to clear. I was sitting at my web browser, hitting refresh over and over again until it cleared in the late afternoon. And there it was. I let out a “Yeah!” and emerged from my office. I walked around dispensing checks to employees, as we had set aside a bonus pool for both staff and instructors. It’s a lot of fun giving away money. I was Asian Santa Claus for a day. I went home for the holidays the following week. At this point my parents were quite pleased with me; my assuming the mortgage on their apartment likely had something to do with that. I zeroed out my student loans that week too. I’d gone from scrapping and scrimping for almost a decade to being a thirty-four-year-old millionaire.

The problem was, they had no beds, but Gebbia did have three air mattresses. “So we inflated them and called ourselves ‘Airbed and Breakfast.’ Three people stayed with us, and we charged them eighty dollars a night. We also made breakfast for them and became their local guides,” Chesky, thirty-four, explained. In the process, they made enough money to cover the rent. More important, though, they discovered a bigger idea that has since blossomed into a multibillion-dollar company, a whole new way for people to make money and tour the world. The idea was to create a global network through which anyone anywhere could rent a spare room in their home to earn cash. In homage to its roots, they called the company Airbnb, which has grown so large that it is now bigger than all the major hotel chains combined—even though, unlike Hilton and Marriott, it doesn’t own a single bed. And the new trend it set off is the “sharing economy.” When I first heard Chesky describe his company, I confess to being a little dubious: I mean, how many people in Paris really want to rent out their kid’s bedroom down the hall to a perfect stranger—who comes to them via the Internet? And how many strangers want to be down the hall? Answer: a lot! By 2016, there were sixty-eight thousand commercial hotel rooms in Paris and more than eighty thousand Airbnb listings.

When I met couples whose marriages were thriving after thirty and forty years, none of them were riding an emotional roller coaster of passion and then resentment. Instead, they loved each other as an act of their conscious will. They were more in control of their love than their “love” was in control of them.

Monitor baths: For some children bathtime winds them up. If that is the case, do it earlier in your routine, or leave it for the morning. For others, it is calming. • Avoid electronics and TV, which can have a reawakening effect on many children. They seem calm and cozied in as they watch TV, but then they are excited when the video is done. Best not to use electronics or TV close to bedtime. • Keep routines short and simple. They should take no more than an hour (at most, if you are including the bath), and thirty minutes is even better. Lengthier routines get children stirred up as they have extra time to anticipate the inevitable separation. • Let them have simple choices. “Would you like to read Curious George first or Goodnight Moon?” Such simple questions give them some, but limited control and keeps you moving forward to bed. • Sing or listen to a lullaby—either can be soothing. Some parents like to add prayers or a quiet review of the day. • Try to create a cozy corner in their room for sleep once your child moves to a bed. Make sure the bed is against a wall, ideally in a corner, and feels like a comforting place. • If one parent is coming home late, do your best not to have it during the good-night routine. For many children, the return of that parent stirs them up. Better that they see you, when they are refreshed, in the morning.

WE HAVE, if we’re lucky, about thirty thousand days to play the game of life. How we play it will be determined by what we value. Or, as David Foster Wallace put it, “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritualtype thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.” We now

My first impulse was to fire right back and embarass her in front of her colleagues with a comment like "A lot of us, meaning you and your thirty personalities

Tokyo." Mr. Fuchigami's voice inflates with pride. "Formerly Edo, almost destroyed by the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, then again in 1944 by nighttime firebombing raids. Tens of thousands were killed." The chamberlain grows silent. "Kishikaisei." "What does that mean?" There's a skip in my chest. We've entered the city now. The high-rises are no longer cut out shapes against the skyline, but looming gray giants. Every possible surface is covered in signs---neon and plastic or painted banners---they all scream for attention. It's noisy, too. There is a cacophony of pop tunes, car horns, advertising jingles, and trains coasting over rails. Nothing is understated. "Roughly translated, 'wake from death and return to life.' Against hopeless circumstances, Tokyo has risen. It is home to more than thirty-five million people." He pauses. "And, in addition, the oldest monarchy in the world." The awe returns tenfold. I clutch the windowsill and press my nose to the glass. There are verdant parks, tidy residential buildings, upmarket shops, galleries, and restaurants. For each sleek, new modern construction, there is one low-slung wooden building with a blue tiled roof and glowing lanterns. It's all so dense. Houses lean against one another like drunk uncles. Mr. Fuchigami narrates Tokyo's history. A city built and rebuilt, born and reborn. I imagine cutting into it like a slice of cake, dissecting the layers. I can almost see it. Ash from the Edo fires with remnants of samurai armor, calligraphy pens, and chipped tea porcelain. Bones from when the shogunate fell. Dust from the Great Earthquake and more debris from the World War II air raids. Still, the city thrives. It is alive and sprawling with neon-colored veins. Children in plaid skirts and little red ties dash between business personnel in staid suits. Two women in crimson kimonos and matching parasols duck into a teahouse.

You know, that’s the first time on Mahina I’ve ever been rained on. By the time you’re my age, it’ll reach the ground. Took a hundred and thirty-three years to build that cloud.

The war against Perot escalated quickly. The booster club geared up a letter-writing campaign to him, state legislators, and the governor. Nearly a thousand letters were sent in protest of Perot’s condemnation of Odessa. Some of the ones to him were addressed “Dear Idiot” or something worse than that, and they not so gently told him to mind his own damn business and not disturb a way of life that had worked and thrived for years and brought the town a joy it could never have experienced anywhere else. “It’s our money,” said Allen of the funds that were used to build the stadium. “If we choose to put it into a football program, and the graduates from our high schools are at or above the state level of standards, then screw you, leave us alone.” At one point Perot, believing his motives had been misinterpreted and hoping to convince people that improving education in Texas was not a mortal sin, contemplated coming to Odessa to speak. But he decided against it, to the relief of some who thought he might be physically harmed if he did. “There are so few other things we can look at with pride,” said Allen. “We don’t have a large university that has thirty or forty thousand students in it. We don’t have the art museum that some communities have and are world-renowned. When somebody talks about West Texas, they talk about football. “There is nothing to replace it. It’s an integral part of what made the community strong. You take it away and it’s almost like you strip the identity of the people.

Jens-Christian Svenning, a tall, crazy-golf-playing scientist from Aarhus University in Denmark, worked out that as many as thirty-one genera of trees that were native to Europe between 5.3 and 2.6 million years ago have since become extinct, whereas thirty-five have survived in the region. If you had taken a grand tour of Europe 3 million years ago, you would have encountered double the diversity of native trees.

moved to the aura-based system. That's part of development: You throw stuff out there, and it works or it doesn't." Ultimately, however, auras passed the Blizzard North test: If a proposal's merit held up after testing, it made the cut. Auras became a defining characteristic of the Paladin. His assortment of combat skills and defensive auras enabled solo players to survive and thrive on their own, while Paladin players were sought after on Battle.net for the benefits their auras granted to parties. To fully upgrade each of any hero's thirty skills would require 600 skill points. The maximum character-level is 99, meaning players will never receive enough points to master—fully upgrade—all thirty skills. That limitation forces them to make difficult choices: maximize proficiency in a few skills, focus on a half dozen, or potentially spread themselves thin to become competent in all abilities but a master of none. Because each hero's skills are exclusive, all players wind up specializing simply by choosing a class. From there they only specialize further, investing heavily in some skills, spending a single point in others to satisfy requirements for later abilities, and ignoring most of the rest. Those limitations are not meant to restrain players, but to encourage them to think carefully about upgrades. The thought they put into skill points creates a bond between players and their avatars, and the satisfaction that comes from seeing a character evolve—as well as choosing each and every piece of a character's equipment load—feeds into Dave Brevik's peacock mentality: No two players were likely to spec out the same hero. In fact, a single player could roll several Amazons or Paladins and develop each differently. In a way, assigning exclusive skills to Diablo II's heroes was more limiting than Diablo's spell books, which could be read and cast by any of the game's three heroes as long as players dumped enough experience points into their Magic stat. Blizzard North's team saw that limitation as a good thing. It fostered agency, asking players to play an active role in evolving their characters.

As hungry as he was, Marin was nonetheless transfixed by the scene in front of him. He’d seen pictures, of course, but no two-dimensional photograph could possibly convey the sense he had of having walked into the medieval past, into a still thriving corner of the Ottoman Empire. The fine, high arch of Stari Most, the Old Bridge, rose nearly thirty metres above the blue-green river, flanked by stone towers and minarets. The bridge, the towers and the surrounding buildings seemed to flow up organically from their footings in the raw, rocky banks of the river, all rendered from the same pale limestone. Behind his sunglasses, tears welled up as Marin was assailed by a wave of unexpected emotion.

Jessie, a fifty-year-old woman with no skills, job opportunities were limited. She may have had a historic family background, but pedigree was of little use when it came to job skills. A few years later, Daisy ghost-wrote an article, “On the Fourteenth Floor,” a first-person account of a woman—a mother of two daughters—who has run out of money and moves to New York City in search of a job. Retail work is available, but she wisely decides that she would not be a good candidate to be a saleswoman. One day, she lunches with a friend at a large hotel in the city and notices that the hotel is bursting with business. Foot traffic in the lobby is thick and without letup. The woman realizes that this is a thriving operation and most likely has job positions available. On a whim, the woman applies for a job, not really knowing what position they would place her in. The manager says she can begin the next day as a chambermaid for thirty-six dollars a month, along with room and board. “On the Fourteenth Floor,” rich in detail as to the woman’s responsibilities and day-to-day activities, is sprinkled with descriptions of her interactions with the clientele. The author also writes of a friendly co-worker named Zayda with whom she becomes close friends. Daisy would give homage to Zayda later in her early career at Street & Smith. Forty years later, Esther would tell stories of the time when the three women lived at a hotel in Manhattan. They lived at the Hotel Astor, Esther said, and socialized with Arturo Toscanini’s wife Carla. Esther remembered Mrs. Toscanini cooking traditional Italian dinners for her and her sister in her suite, much to the consternation of the hotel management. Although there is no documentation proving this, and neither Jessie nor Daisy mention living at the Astor in their journals, Esther’s reminisces about socializing with the wife of the legendary conductor line up chronologically with the time that she lived at the hotel.

thirty-minute argument with your significant other can slow your body’s ability to heal by at least a day. And if you argue regularly, that delay is doubled. Even subtle forms of anger, such as impatience, irritability, and grouchiness, may damage health.

By the age of four, a child of professionals would have heard 32 million more words than a child on welfare. This 'thirty-million word gap' appears to have a huge impact in the child's development. 'With few exceptions, the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children's vocabularies were growing and the higher the children's IQ test scores at age three and later,' Hart and Risley wrote. They continued to follow the children until they were nine years old and found that the number of words young children heard seemed to have a substantial impact on their brain development, IQ, and school performance. Later research has confirmed their findings, as well as their conclusion that by school age poor children are often so far behind that it is difficult for them to catch up. Moreover, many of the words low-income children heard were stern ones of scolding, while professional parents praised their children at every opportunity. Children on welfare heard two words of discouragement for every encouraging one, while children of professionals received six encouraging words for every discouraging one. As David Olds and many other researchers have found, it's not that poor families are averse to talking to their babies or to praising them...By and large, parents of every background love their kids, want them to succeed, and are happy to help them thrive. The problem is that struggling single moms living in poverty are stressed and busy, don't realize that talking to a baby is critical, and often are accustomed to a parenting style that is authoritarian.

Dog ownership in NYC is an advanced-level project, something you do in your thirties or forties when you've given up on the rest of your dreams and need something else to fill the time.

So, we are still at plus two species: Oxford ragwort and Yorkwort. And it did not stop there: Oxford ragwort’s tour of Britain has been extensive, hybridizing with common groundsel elsewhere, often spawning a plant called Senecio baxteri. Because thirty-chromosome baxteri is sterile, that doesn’t count as a new species. However, a few individual baxteri plants must, by chance, have experienced a developmental ‘error’ somewhere in North Wales, and a fertile sixty-chromosome version was born. Hence Senecio cambrensis, Welsh groundsel, arrived on the scene4–speciation in an instant. Species number three. The same thing happened in Edinburgh, but they were very like cambrensis and died out again, so perhaps we should not add the Edinburgh hybrids to the credits.

There is mounting performance pressure on all of us—as individuals and institutions. All of this connectivity means significantly lower barriers to entry and movement, accelerating change and the increasing occurrence of extreme, disruptive events, all of which put significant pressure on our institutions … On a personal level, the example I use is a billboard that used to be up on a highway here in Silicon Valley which asked a simple question: ‘How does it feel to know that there are at least one million people around the world who can do your job?’ While we might argue whether it is one thousand or one million, it would have been an absurd question to ask twenty or thirty years ago because it didn’t really matter—I’m here and they are somewhere else. Now it is increasingly a central question, and one might add, ‘How does it feel to know there are at least one million robots who can do your job?’ We are all feeling mounting performance pressure at

The same trends are true for those who indicated that they prayed more than once a day. The eighteen to thirty-four age range actually saw an increase of a couple percentage points here, while the over-sixty-five group saw a noticeable decline. It is unclear what’s behind these curious trends, but the young adults are praying more.

Narcissi and Daffodils live for generations. I know some double yellow Daffodils growing in my great-grandfather’s garden, that were planted over seventy years ago. The place was[153] sold and the house burned about thirty years since, and all this time has been entirely neglected. Some one told me that Daffodils and Narcissi still bloomed there bravely in the grass. With a cousin, one lovely day last spring, I took the train out to this old place and there found quantities of the dainty yellow flowers. We had come unprovided with any gardening implements, having nothing of the kind in town, and brought only a basket for the spoils, and a steel table-knife. We quickly found the knife of no avail, so borrowed a sadly broken coal-shovel from a tumble-down sort of a man who stood gazing at us from the door of a tumble-down house. The roots of the Daffodils were very deep, and neither of us could use a spade, so the driver of the ramshackle wagon taken at the station was pressed into service. Handling of shovel or spade was evidently an unknown art to him. The Daffodil roots were nearly a foot deep, but we finally got them, several hundreds of them, all we could[154] carry. The driver seemed to think us somewhat mad and said “Them’s only some kind of weed,” but when I told him the original bulbs from which all these had come were planted by my great-grandmother and her daughter, and that I wanted to carry some away, to plant in my own garden, he became interested and dug with all his heart. The bulbs were in solid clumps a foot across and had to be pulled apart and separated. They were the old Double Yellow Daffodil and a very large double white variety, the edges of the petals faintly tinged with yellow and delightfully fragrant. My share of the spoils is now thriving in my garden. By the process of division every three years, these Daffodils can be made to yield indefinitely, and perhaps some great-grandchild of my own may gather their blossoms.

She’s often heard that IT is the nerve center of the entire organization, because over the last thirty years almost every business process has been automated through IT systems. But for whatever reason, businesses have allowed their nervous system to become degraded, like multiple sclerosis disrupting the flow of information within the brain and between the brain and the body.

Weiss shows that the U.S. approach generates far more social wealth. True, the information is initially provided for free, but a thriving private weather industry has sprung up which takes the publicly funded data as its raw material and then adds value to it. The U.S. weather risk management industry, for example, is more than ten times bigger than the European one, employing more people, producing more valuable products, generating more social wealth. Another study estimates that Europe invests 9.5 billion Euros in weather data and gets approximately 68 billion back in economic value—in everything from more efficient farming and construction decisions to better holiday planning—a sevenfold multiplier. The United States, by contrast, invests twice as much—19 billion—but gets back a return of 750 billion Euros, a thirty-nine-fold multiplier.